Former HCL Technologies CEO Vineet Nayar, while speaking at the AI Impact Summit in Delhi, warned that Indian IT companies will remain focused on profits rather than employment, as artificial intelligence threatens to disrupt myriad industries, from software development and factory work to music and the movies.
“From an employment point of view I think it is very important for us to understand that Indian companies, including Indian IT companies, are going to be profit-driven and therefore if you believe that they are going to create employment you must be dreaming. Therefore, the question is how do we create employment in this environment, and that employment comes from mass scale startups, which is what this government has already doing,” Nayar said.
The remarks comes as India, with its large customer service and tech support sectors, could be vulnerable, and shares in the country’s outsourcing firms have plunged in recent days, partly due to advances in AI assistant tools.
In AI competitiveness, India ranks third globally, trailing the US and China, according to Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI. Big names including OpenAI and Anthropic are setting up operations in India, courting enterprise customers, developers and government agencies. Google and Meta are expanding data centers to serve one of the fastest-growing markets for models such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. Nvidia Corp., squeezed by US export curbs on high-end chips in China, sees India as a counterweight, though its chief pulled out of the summit at the last hour citing “unforeseen circumstances.”
AI to wipe out jobs?
Leading CEOs—including those from Ford, Amazon, Salesforce, and JP Morgan Chase—have proclaimed that many white-collar jobs at their companies will soon disappear.
The same fears were expressed by Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman who warned that AI could automate a large share of white-collar jobs within the next 12 to 18 months, as the company accelerates development of what he calls “professional-grade AGI”. In an interview with the Financial Times, Suleyman said, “White-collar jobs, essentially those sitting in front of computers whether lawyers, accountants, project managers, or marketers… most of these tasks will be fully automated by AI within the next 12 to 18 months.”
Recently, Amazon, FedEx, and Ericsson and others have announced restructuring tied partly to automation and efficiency drives.
AI spooks Dalal Street
Stock market investors have erased nearly $50 billion from the market capitalisation of IT companies since the start of 2025, amid growing concerns that artificial intelligence tools could dent the sector’s future revenue. Analysts estimate that platforms such as Anthropic’s Cowork plugins and Palantir’s ERP software may shave off about 2% from annual revenue growth over the next three to four years.
The negative sentiment intensified after US-based AI startup Anthropic earlier this month launched a new product designed for corporate legal teams. The company, which developed the Claude chatbot, said the tool can automate several legal functions, including contract reviews, non-disclosure agreement triage, compliance workflows, drafting legal briefs and generating standardised responses.